1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to appliqué emblems having digitally-printed detailing such as text, logo graphics, numbers, or other indicia that portray a three-dimensional finely-embroidered appearance. The appliqué emblems are applied by thermal activated or pressure sensitive adhesives, or by sewing directly onto garments, apparel, and accessories, thereby eliminating the need for sewn embroidery.
2. Description of the Background
Fashion, “basic” and performance apparel, uniform, swimwear, intimate apparel, outerwear and accessory manufacturers use various methods to apply decoration and identification to garments and textiles. They tend to use silk-screening, screen-printing, thermo-transfer films, sonic welding, and direct embroidery as their primary methods for decorating and identification.
Silk-screening of logos or emblems is commonly used, but this process is complex and time-consuming. In addition, the designs created by silk-screening are flat, lack texture, and do not withstand repeated industrial or home washings. Consequently, many companies prefer embroidery as their primary method for applying decoration and identification.
Sonic welding is another method used to apply decoration and identification to garments and textiles. This process requires the creation of unique, expensive special dies for any design to be applied. The quick-change requirements associated with the fashion industry make this process slow and relatively expensive. Sonic welding allows texturing, but also requires chemical compounds that some companies find unacceptable, and that can result in a product that does not withstand repeated home and industrial laundering. Thus, this process typically is not used by the uniform industry for these reasons.
Despite the foregoing alternatives, embroidery has become the predominant method for applying decoration and identification. Traditionally, embroidery is performed by a machine that applies stitching of various colors and styles to fabric to create a design. Embroidered designs have a much greater aesthetic value, but require a complex and time-consuming process. A separate stitching step is required for each color in the design and for each design element.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,009,943 to Stahl discloses a method for producing a multi-colored emblem that may be ironed-on to garments to provide an embroidered appearance. This method entails laminating a material blank, cutting the laminated material to a specific design, embroidering about the periphery of the cut design, laminating the assembly onto a second material blank, and coating the underside with a thermal adhesive layer. The emblem can then be heat-sealed to a garment.
There are other transfer emblems that may be applied to various cloth surfaces without embroidery. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,635,001 to Mahn, Jr. issued Jun. 3, 1997, shows cloth transfers that include a cloth layer coated with a plastic layer which is, in turn, coated with a pressure sensitive adhesive layer.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,914,176 to Myers issued Jun. 22, 1999, shows a composite design for attachment to another fabric article, comprising an underlying layer of twill fabric on one side of which a design is screen printed with plastisol based inks and heat cured. The twill is cut into a desired shape so that the twill and the ink portion form the composite design. Methods of making and attaching the composite design are disclosed.
Though stitched embroidery is avoided, in both of the foregoing cases, the ink designs are screen printed and die cut. These are independent steps creating a cumbersome process. The resulting product is inferior in durability to washing and cannot be ironed. Further the preferred embodiment uses plastisols in the inks, which are objectionable to many apparel manufacturers. More recent technological advances have been made in the field of digital printing and advanced cutting to reduce the cost, development cycle time, product cycle time, and required inventories.
Multi-color electrostatic printing techniques are described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,899,604 to Clark; U.S. Pat. No. 4,181,423 to Pressman et al.; and U.S. Pat. No. 5,749,032 to Landa et al. Manufacturers of electrostatic printers include RasterGraphics (Orchard Parkway, San Jose, Calif.) and 3M (St. Paul, Minn.), all of whom have introduced 54 inch wide printers with multiple inking fountains for displays, signs and banners, trade show graphics, outdoor billboards, fleet graphics, bus shelters, wall paper, vinyl flooring, and backlit displays, etc. Dye sublimation has dramatically increased the applications for electrostatic printing. By imaging first on electrostatic paper and then applying heat, pressure and time, color images can be transferred onto a wide variety of other substrates, including, but not limited to a wide variety of polyester fabrics. Thermal Inkjets are a new print format that are capable of economical high-quality production-speed fabric printing. For example, the Colorfast™ Fabrijet™ Thermal Inkjet is capable of 600 dpi or 1200 dpi using 12 printing heads that deposit a reactive, acid CMYK ink. Similarly, Stork Digital Imaging has introduced its Sapphire II™ digital printer for high-quality sampling and production runs on textile and apparel. This system is capable of printing on a wide variety of natural and synthetic textiles including silk and polyamide, as well as stretch fabrics. The DuPont™ Artistri™ is a fully integrated, production capable digital printing system developed for printing on all type of fabrics including cellulosic, polyamides, and polyesters. The system was designed for a variety of applications, including printed textiles, accessories, apparel, home furnishings, gaming table covers, flags, banners, soft signage, and trade show displays. This thermal inkjet printer is also equipped with an on-board heating unit that is designed to cure the inks onto the fabrics before they exit the roll-to-roll printer. The final setting of the inks on polyesters can occur on a heated calendar.
Despite these print hardware and transfer advances, there are no current production methods for producing multi-colored printed appliqué emblems that exhibit an accurate three-dimensional embroidered appearance. This is due to difficulties in image manipulation and rendering. Currently, “cleaning up” existing low-res jpeg/tiff/bmp images (100-300 dpi) for embroidery is a cumbersome task, entailing importing into vector format using a program such as CorelDraw™ and then manually touching up. Conventional graphics programs manipulate either bitmaps or vector-based drawings. Vector-based drawings have the advantage of being scalable without loss of detail. Scaling bitmapped graphics can result in visible defects, such as aliasing. Bitmapped images also tend to have large file sizes, and are difficult to edit to change text, line placement, etc. Vector-based drawings are thus commonly preferred for images that need to be revised. However, printing or displaying a vector-based drawing generally requires that a bitmap rendering be performed at some time, since most printers and display monitors are raster-scanned bitmap devices.
There are a variety of well-known conversion solutions for converting digital images into embroidery data (sequences of x, y values representing the horizontal and vertical location of each needle penetration and subsequently the end point locations for stitches). For example, the Wilcom ES65™ software has the ability to convert vectors to stitches. However, there are far fewer attempts at converting low-resolution embroidery output files, or scanned images into vector format for touching up, and then into high-resolution (300 dpi or higher) raster formats suitable for printing with a digital printer, or for display and printing 3D embroidered-appearance transfers.
One example is U.S. Pat. No. 5,668,730, which describes a system that allows a pattern to be scanned into a computer, and image characteristics of the scanned image are recognized. This is similar to tracing a bitmap image in CorelDraw to achieve a vector format, albeit the patent automates the process. Beyond this, manual manipulation of the image is required for accuracy.
The Wilcom TrueSizer™ application touts universal file conversion capabilities between numerous file formats, and designs can be scaled and printed for production worksheets, presentations, and sales printouts. It is not clear whether TrueSizer can convert low-res images into high-resolution (such as 720 dpi) 3D formats suitable for printing with a digital printer, or for display and printing 3D embroidered-appearance transfers.
Regardless, the image/resolution conversion process significantly detracts from the realism of the finally-printed image because fine three-dimensional embroidery details are lost.
It would be greatly advantageous to provide process for producing an appliqué transfer emblem bearing various combinations of digitally-printed embroidery elements such as letters, logo graphics, numbers, or other indicia that portrays a three-dimensional finely-embroidered appearance.